Aurora, goddess of dawn, greets the dew-fresh morn by imbibing the chaste aroma of a calla lily in this kitschy pseudo-porn by the French academic painter, William Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

 

Arise! Awake! Or Mope Forever!

Up at crow piss

A Canadian Maritimes expression for one who bounds from bed pert and alert and ready to kick ass. If such an awakening happens in Ottawa, seat of Canada’s bureaucrat-infested government, it should read: “ready to lick ass.”

Up at first sparrow fart

An Ontario urban expression descriptive of an early riser

 

Americans Who Think Canadians are Commies

An old cheapie putdown has reared its frowsy head again this year, as American morons against health-care reform begin referring to Canada as “Soviet Canuckistan.” I wonder what the Yankee brainstems and southern white trash think that welfare is. Is welfare socialism? [Leave space for clueless dork to utter Homer Simpson “Duhhhhh!”] Come now, all you U.B.As (United Bozos of Alabama): Without American welfare payments, how would you be able to raise those chillun' you had with your sister. Did welfare to help pay for those burdensome crack cocaine pipes turn god-fearin' Amurricans into soulless Commie bastards? Not yet, born-again droolers.

 

Bush Salmon

In rural British Columbia, this is hunters’ “humorous” synonym for illegally shot deer.

 

Kabloona

Eskimo insult word for white people. Aw, you thought it only worked the other way around, where evil white oppressors insulted our noble blubber-gummin' denizens of the North. No, dears, every language on earth has a supply of racist putdowns. Just as we all have our national anthems and love songs. Big Number One Song on the current Eskimo top ten is a love ballad: “Just a Jerrycan of Esso and You.”

Kabluna is Inuktitut for “bushy eyebrow.” A reference to their qalluit, the bushy eyebrows that Eskimoes perceived as a feature of white Europeans.Its implication was that any over-eyebrowed dude was a foreigner (non-Inuit), and was dumb as walrus shit, much like our English characterization of persons who have one long eyebrow extending right across their face. Sometimes the Inuktitut plural is used, kabloonat, sometimes an English plural, kabloonas.

Kabloona?

The current accepted spelling is qalluaaq or qablunaaq in Inuinnaqtun, a dialect of Inuktitut. Eastern Canadian Inuktitut qallujnaaq ‘foreigner’ is influenced by or blended with Greenlandic kablunak ‘foreigner.’

Kabloona is a famous anthropology-cum-arctic-travel book by the aristocratic French adventurer, Le Comte Gontran De Poncins, written in collaboration with Lewis Galantiere, first published in English in 1941. It details his solo sojourn among the Inuit of Canada’s King William Island during 1938 and 1939.

Joined eyebrows are not always a token of nincompoopery. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s monobrow was a sign of artistic uniqueness, a sleek superciliary raven awing across her forehead, adorning beauty’s brow with dark pinions.

Brain Bucket

The helmet worn by hockey players to protect their heads is so called in Canada’s lively hockey slang.